Hank McCoy (Before the Fur)

I’m a big Halo fan. I mean, who isn’t these days, right? So what I’m about to say here is controversial, but I’m going to go ahead and say it: the reason I love Halo is because there is more to Halo than Chief. Now, I love Chief. I love that he’s this sort of cyborg-Clint-Eastwood-living-legend war hero. But what I really love is the setting that Halo takes place in. See, Halo, from my perspective, is just the legacy of video games like Doom (first person shooters) and Wing Commander and Mechwarrior (simulators- a genre of video game that is scarce these days. A Penny Arcade write-up I read about simulators explained that they were games that were devoted to ‘taking fantasy very, very seriously’). The idea of the latter is to give you the experience of being a single soldier in a realistic battlefield- mostly through the automation of the actions of various other soliders and entities around you. So yeah, in a simulator, maybe you’re the hero of the story and you can turn the tide of a battle- but fighting it alone is almost always suicide. See, and that’s what I love about Halo. Chief is the savior of the human race through the series- but he’s just one guy. Johnson, Keyes, Arbiter, Cortona…Lord Hood. Where would the human race be without ALL of them? There’s more than one hero in the story. I was a little disappointed, for example, that Halo 3 didn’t feature the Arbiter a little more prominently. I mean, there’s still plenty of “Arby” to see. I loved that he was a playable character in the second game, that you got to see the Covenant a little more up close and personal. And I just love the background for the character, in general. Everybody relies on Chief, but the prophets put Arbiter in this position where they fully expect him to die eventually. And instead, he ends up heading a revolution against them. I loved it because it made you see the Covenant in this new way- they weren’t just a bunch of drooling, slimy alien monsters (well, okay, the Elites weren’t anyway). Maybe the Covenant was corrupt and the role of ‘Arbiter’ had just become some tool of the Hierarchs, but at one point, maybe it was a role that really meant something. So Arbiter kind of ‘reclaims’ that role and turns it back into something meaningful. Simillar thoughts on ODST- the general sense I get is that people aren’t thrilled that you can’t take tons of damage without flinching, like Chief can. But I just love that Bungie made a game where you are playing a human character- and therefore have to fight the Covenant LIKE a human, NOT a Spartan super-soldier. Anyway, this is a long way of getting to my point on Halo: Uprising, a four issue limited series by Marvel. If I’ve seen one thing in the feedback from people, it’s ‘Chief isn’t in it that much!’ But see, I’m okay with that. It isn’t that I don’t want to see more of Chief- I just like the idea that a story can be told in the Halo universe and it doesn’t have to involve Chief. He’s just one character- and the story is being told at a time when Chief is fairly tied up (set between Halo 2 and Halo 3, Chief is captured on his way back to Earth.). Granted, I don’t know if the comic can have the same appeal as a Halo video game- but it doesn’t have to. The point isn’t to give you some intense, action experience (although there is plenty of action in it) but to tell a complex story in the middle of a well-developed setting. The main character, in this case, is human- in fact, he isn’t even a Marine. He’s a human concierge for a hotel in Cleveland, a man named Ruwan. And he has a ‘key’ that the Covenant is after. I won’t ruin the rest for you… To top it off, it's written by Brian Michael Bendis. How can you go wrong with that, right?